"Goodbye Cruel World" is a song written by Gloria Shayne Baker, who also wrote the well-known Christmas carol, "Do You Hear What I Hear?" and several songs for singer Lesley Gore. The most famous recording of this song is by James Darren. Released as a single in 1961, Darren scored his first top ten hit on the Billboard Hot 100 when "Goodbye Cruel World" peaked at number three. It would prove the biggest hit of Darren's career on this chart, as well as on the UK Singles Chart (#28).
Darren, playing pop idol "Kip Dennis," performed the song on a late 1961 episode of "The Donna Reed Show." (He had previously played a different character in a 1959 episode of the sitcom.) The song was also used in a film on Pop Art directed by Ken Russell for the BBC TV series Monitor which aired in March 1962; its context here was the escape from the dying culture of the British Empire.
According to disc jockeys at the time the song was released, the calliope (music)-like riff used in the song was a synthesized recording of a woman's voice rather than a musical instrument.
Famous quotes containing the words goodbye, cruel and/or world:
“When superstition is allowed to perform the task of old age in dulling the human temperament, we can say goodbye to all excellence in poetry, in painting, and in music.”
—Denis Diderot (1713–1784)
“In time the scouring of wind and rain will wear down the ranges and plane off the region until it has the drab monotony of the older deserts. In the meantime—a two-million-year meantime—travelers may enjoy the cruel beauties of a desert in its youth,....”
—For the State of California, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“In our world of big names, curiously, our true heroes tend to be anonymous. In this life of illusion and quasi-illusion, the person of solid virtues who can be admired for something more substantial than his well-knownness often proves to be the unsung hero: the teacher, the nurse, the mother, the honest cop, the hard worker at lonely, underpaid, unglamorous, unpublicized jobs.”
—Daniel J. Boorstin (b. 1914)